Ray Kurzweil is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.He has been described as “the restless genius” by the “Wall Street Journal”, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by “Forbes”. “Inc.” magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.In 2013, Ray was appointed Director of Engineering for Google. Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office. All in all he has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.Ray has written four national bestselling books. His most popular publication, "The Singularity is Near", has been the number one book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His latest book is "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed". Ray speaks to diverse audiences around the world, presenting a provocative, long-term, big picture view of the future of technology and its implications for society.